2024 according to Cloudflare: Global traffic up, Google still king, US churning out bots

Cloudflare says that global internet traffic grew by 17.2 percent this year, with Google still the most visited internet service, while the US was the source of over a third of global bot traffic (again).

The content delivery network posts an annual review of the trends it has observed from traffic it has handled during the year, with at least 19 percent of the internet covered by its web security services, according to some estimates.

But even in the fast-paced world of the interwebs, it seems some things don’t change much. A glance at last year’s review shows that Google was most visited, traffic was up, and America was the home of the bots!

Worldwide growth in traffic was fairly muted for the first half of 2024, according to Cloudflare, picking up pace about mid-August, climbing through the end of November to hit 17.2 percent for the year. This trend is similar to the pattern seen for 2023 and 2022, the biz says.

As far as bots go, this label covers any non-human internet traffic, so not all are necessarily malicious. Cloudflare says it maintains a list of verified bots such as those used for search engine indexing, performance testing, and availability monitoring.

However, the US is far and away the largest source of this traffic, accounting for 34.6 percent, while second-placed Germany sits at just 6.8 percent. Iran, China, and Singapore follow, with the UK in sixth place at 3.2 percent.

You don’t have to look far to find the reason. The US is home to companies that are the biggest sources. Amazon Web Services was responsible for 12.7 percent of global bot traffic, and 7.8 percent came from Google, with the Googlebot web crawler responsible for the highest volume of request traffic to Cloudflare for its indexing work.

AI bots have been in the news this year as they trawl the web for content to train models, and Cloudflare now has a dedicated tracking page for these. The company says that Bytespider, a crawler operated by TikTok owner ByteDance, started high but has shown decreasing activity through the year, while Anthropic’s ClaudeBot has spiked in activity a number of times.

One surprise (or perhaps not) is that IPv6 traffic is actually down as a percentage of the packets that passed through Cloudflare’s network. It says that 28.5 percent of global traffic was IPv6 during 2024, whereas last year’s report put this figure at 33.75 percent.

The company also reveals that a fifth of all TCP connections (20.7 percent) are unexpectedly terminated before any useful data can be exchanged. Causes of this could vary from DoS attacks, quirky client behavior, or a network interrupting a connection to filter content.

Cloudflare says about half of these incidents were connections closed “Post SYN” – after its server has received a client’s SYN packet, but before a subsequent acknowledgement (ACK) or any useful data. These can be attributed to DoS attacks or internet scanning, while Post-ACK or Post-PSH anomalies are more often associated with connection tampering activity such as filtering, especially if they occur at high rates in specific networks.

Mobile device traffic accounted for about 41.3 percent of the total, which is roughly the same as last year. This is largely split between the Apple and Android ecosystems, with iOS on almost a third and Android accounting for two-thirds.

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This varies by region. Countries with a higher gross national income per capita such as the US, Canada, Norway and Sweden tend to have a higher percentage of iPhone traffic, while Africa, Asia, and South America showed higher levels of Android usage.

Google’s Chrome appears to be the most popular browser by far, accounting for 65.8 percent of all requests during 2024. Just 15.5 percent came from Apple’s Safari browser, which leads the way on iOS devices, naturally. Microsoft’s Edge accounted for 6.9 percent of browsing, while Mozilla Firefox stood at 4 percent.

For search engines, Google also claimed the top spot, with a greater than 88 percent share of all search traffic that passed through Cloudflare. Yandex and Baidu were next with 3.1 percent and 2.7 percent, respectively, while Bing trailed with 2.6 percent. DuckDuckGo accounted for 0.9 percent of searches.

One surprising figure is that 13 percent of traffic operating with Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.3 is using post-quantum encryption, which must mean that some organizations must be taking seriously the potential security threat posed by quantum computers.

Cloudflare names Spain as the leader in internet download speed (292.6 Mbps) and upload speed (192.6 Mbps), and says that the top ten countries all had average download speeds above 200 Mbps.

The firm also said that 6.5 percent of global traffic it handled during 2024 needed mitigation by its security systems to protect customers from threats. This is up about a percentage point over the previous year.

Cloudflare cites Albania as having one of the highest mitigated traffic levels this year, at 42.9 percent, with Libya another notable offender. The share of mitigated traffic in the US grew to 5 percent, up from 3.65 percent last year, while in South Korea it dropped slightly to 8.1 percent.

More detail is available at the company’s Cloudflare Radar for those interested in digging through the data. ®